00:00Hi my name is Jessica and welcome to My Sweet Dates where I share 460 square
00:04feet with my fiancee. Come on in.
00:11I live in Burbank California next to the Warner Brothers Studios. I live here with
00:15my fiancee Dean and we've been living together for almost two years. I bought
00:18this place for $259 which I thought was a lot at the time but now that it's
00:23selling for $375 I think I got a good deal. This is the closet that I turned
00:27into the office also known as the clothis. The reason why I call it clothis is
00:31because originally it was a sliding door closet but I needed more square footage
00:35so I actually took off the doors, added a hanging light, painted the inside and
00:40stuck my desk in there. Now it's my little office area. Right behind the door when
00:44you enter you're gonna see our travel map. My fiancee and I signify all the gold pins
00:48for places that we've been together. All of the white pins are places he's been
00:52himself and all the black pins are places I go by myself. Every time we go to a new
00:56place it's kind of fun to come home and stick another pin on the mat. Right
00:59below it I actually hung a walking stick. We took a trip to Japan and climb Mount
01:04Fuji and every time we hit another checkpoint all the way up to the summit
01:08we got a little stamp so it's one of the hardest trips that we've been on
01:11together but it really built our relationship so it's really important to
01:14us. This is the kitchen. When I first started house hunting I had a long list of
01:18must-haves. I had to have outdoor space, I had to have two rooms, I had to have
01:23indoor washer and dryer, a gas stove and central air and I got one of them. I think
01:29cooking is one of the things that my fiancee Dean and I like to do a lot
01:32together because we have the one must-have in here. He loves to make
01:37chicken wings, he's the best and I love to make quinoa that my mom taught me to
01:40make. To utilize the vertical space I actually had somebody who does a lot of
01:45work on my parents house build these octagon shells for me. We kind of house our
01:49plants, some of our family pictures and every time we drink a bottle of wine we name it
01:53and we stick it in this. My biggest regret with designing this space, it's kind of a
01:59love-hate relationship, was picking white floors. I think it was a good idea because
02:04the white floors make the 460 square feet feel bigger however anytime you move
02:10furniture anytime you walk in here you're gonna leave a scuff so I guess it's
02:14something I just have to deal with. You would think that this is a shoes-off
02:17household because everything is so white but I really don't care. Just walk on in.
02:23Welcome to the dining room area. This dining room set actually didn't start as
02:27a set. The table is for my parents, three of the chairs are from a thrift store and
02:31one of the chairs is from a flea market. We painted everything white and added the
02:35same fabric on top of the seats to make it my dining room set. It's actually a
02:39place that we end up piling everything on. When we walk through the door, our
02:43work bag, our jackets, everything ends up here so the next day we have to clear it off
02:46again. The most sentimental piece is probably the hutch. It is currently our
02:51mini bar but it wasn't always a mini bar. It was actually my parents china
02:55cabinet that was in their first home so when I bought my first property it was
02:59kind of like a rite of passage. When you live in a small space you may think that
03:03you need certain things but after a while you realize you don't utilize it as
03:08much as you should. So we had a small couch at one point and no one ever sat on it
03:13so we swapped it out for a credenza from CB2. I can't really remember how much it
03:18costs. I think I block out things that I have to pay full price for but if I had
03:22to guess probably around three or four hundred dollars. Dean actually did a lot
03:25of his work from this dining table so having a little bit of extra storage for
03:29his work stuff and a lot of other things that were laying around the house was
03:33way more important than a couch. My favorite piece in the entire place is
03:37probably also the most functional. My dad built a pony wall slash
03:42shoe caddy slash TV swivel mount and that serves as a divider between our two
03:47faces the dining room and our bedroom. So I need to find a lighting solution for the
03:54bedroom area because it was a little dark in here. I already had a bull head that I
03:58attached to my wall as kind of art and decided to stick a light bulb kind of in
04:02its mouth area to make it into a sconce. Every time Dean looks at it he says it
04:07looks a little demonic but I think it was smart and cute. What do you think? Leave it in the
04:11comments.
04:13One of the hardest things about living in such a small space with another person
04:16is if you have a disagreement you have nowhere to go. So kind of a little
04:21unspoken thing that Dean and I do is when we have a little argument he goes
04:25into the dining area I stay in the bed and it's probably the only two spaces in
04:30the house where you can't see each other. So until we cool off a little bit
04:33that's where we stay. Dean and I met at a party called Colors a little over three
04:38years ago. It was the last couple minutes of the party the last call and he asked
04:43to buy me a drink and I told him I wanted a water. We ended up talking for
04:46the rest of the night exchange numbers and we've been inseparable ever since.
04:51This is a closet that Dean and I share. So I've worked in fashion and eyewear for
04:55the last five six years. I currently work at Trina Turk and I've worked there for
05:01about a year and three months and I love it. My last place was a loft with two
05:06walk-in closets so I know you can imagine downsizing to one closet and then
05:11sharing it was difficult but I think that the pieces I kept were the pieces I
05:14actually wear all the time so I don't really mind it as much. One decision we
05:18made was to take the sliding doors off. You know that little middle part that you
05:22can never get to? We couldn't afford to lose that space so by taking the doors
05:25off we actually ended up fitting more in there. The one door in the house leads to
05:29our bathroom. So the first thing I realized when I got to the bathroom area
05:33of this place was that the sink wasn't even inside the bathroom. It's actually
05:37directly across from the closet but by having the sink on the outside of the
05:40bathroom it allows us to both get ready at the same time. I mentioned I had a
05:43long list of must-haves and one of them was a clawfoot tub and instead I got
05:48this. I guess it works for the purpose of getting ready but I really want a nice
05:52beautiful clawfoot that I can light candles. Yeah, wishful thinking. After Dean and I
05:57get married next April we're hoping to upsize a little bit and this time I'm
06:02not gonna have a long list of wants. I just want a door. When I first moved in
06:05and bought this place it was just for myself so when Dean moved in to downsize
06:10my stuff even more than I already had was a task but sharing it with Dean solidifying
06:16our relationship it ended up being the best choice in the end.
